Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.
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Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?
Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.
With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.
The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.
SH: You make a note of the language politics too, in your translator’s afterword, that her Russian is “different from the kinds of Russian spoken in the Russian Federation.” How important was it for you to get that difference into the English translation or to the English-language reader?
EO: It’s really important to me. If I were left to my own devices, without an editor, this possibly would be a more difficult book to read because I would try to foreignise English more by doing longer sentences, by doing asyndetons. I really find it annoying how, in English, when we do a list it always has to end with “and” before the last item. Why can’t you just do a comma? It’s slightly different; it puts the items you are listing in much more complicated relationship. I would have an English that is more like the syntax of the original—in other words, it would be less of a “good” translation. My editor is great, he is fabulous, but he also knows that if I were left to my own devices, the book wouldn’t be that readable.
In part, it’s because the point of this complicated Austro-Hungarian syntax that you have in European languages of the sixteenth century—like in Montaigne before the French Academy comes in—is to use the sentence as a tool for thinking, for making more precise arguments, or for arguing with yourself; now, we use syntax in a very different way. We basically plan and then we write. I am more interested in writing that is not planned, but is in itself an event that happens.
SH: I think most of us will be quite interested in how this book might have turned out under a different set of circumstances. I want to get back to what you said about the rejection of classical narratives. In this book, there is a wide range of voices, of stories, and I’m not sure who is speaking most of the time. It’s very slim, but it’s not the kind of book that I could have read in one sitting; there is such a polyphonic quality to it. Each person we encounter seems to contain a whole, hidden novel. Was it a particular challenge translating something that had so many voices, that was so splintered?
EO: The challenge was to try to do these different voices in English. This kind of variation is much more difficult to do in translation because, in the original, the characters can have linguistic tics based on a slightly dialectal way of saying something. There’s one character in the book, for example, who is constantly talking in these silly sayings and the sayings are built in such a way that they develop out of each other and undermine each other. But, you know, they don’t really exist in English, or I had to make them up—which is not hard to do when you’re dealing with one or two of them, but when you’re dealing with a whole stream where one comes out of another, that’s not easy. As for the multiplicity of voices: Yevgenia has been in Kyiv until a few days ago, and she’s been keeping a diary in German, which has been appearing in English everyday. If you read this diary, you can see it is very similar [to Lucky Breaks] because she goes out on the streets and meets people, talking to people to get these momentary windows into them, and then going on.
SH: Ever since I started reading Lucky Breaks, I’ve also been following the diary. In the most recent one, Belorusets writes: “When the war started, I had no set plans to remain in Kyiv, but I quickly became the hostage of my own diary […] it struck me as important to witness what was happening.” This book was translated before February 24. How has it been a witness to the current war?
EO: Obviously, the war drew a lot of attention to the book; [Lucky Breaks] has been reviewed everywhere. I mean, what can I say? It would have been better if there would have been no war and there wouldn’t have been as much attention to the book. It’s been very hard.
SH: I’ve been reading this book through the prism of what is written in the war diary, and one very striking element to me is Belorusets’s use of images. Images we don’t usually associate with war; images that are elusive, that don’t quite have a hold on me as a narrative. They are always on the edge of my vision when I read the book; in the process of translation, were they also at the edge of yours?
EO: As a translator, the really difficult thing about images is the grammatical connections. There are different grammatical ways of connecting things in different languages and sometimes, an easy and natural connection in Russian becomes stiff and artificial in English—because that grammatical possibility is missing. Some of the images are also based on words where the semantic range of the word is used in the image, but the semantic ranges of words vary in different languages.
The thing about this book is also that what happens on stage [in Lucky Breaks] is the stuff that usually happens offstage in a war. If you read about what is being done by the Russian army in Bucha and other areas around Kyiv, there are a few things like that which are hinted at in the book, but that’s not the kind of stuff the book is about. In part because, right now, the fighting is on so much of a larger scale, with so many more victims, and with a lot more coverage. That war in the East, the Donbas War—or the Donbas stage of the current war—was always happening in the margins, because the Russians weren’t acting openly, because it was in the border areas. It wasn’t in the margins for the people who were directly affected, but for most people who are not in Ukraine—and even for a lot of Ukrainians—it was a war in the margins. It’s not just in the margins right now, it’s everywhere.
SH: Now that the war is in the centre for Ukrainians, and also internationally, there’s been a big push for more Ukrainian stories to be translated into English. The New York Times has called this an “urgent mission”. What can translation do in such a moment where the war is in the centre?
EO: It’s a way of bringing attention to the war, but an indirect way. It’s also a way of correcting a historical wrong. If you go into an average Slavic Studies department, it’s going to be basically a Russian Studies department with maybe a little bit of something else. In this way, Russian literature—despite very often not wanting to do this—has largely profited from Russian imperialism. The aim is to bring more attention to Ukrainian literature—to other Slavic literatures—in order to make the history of Russian literature more complicated by showing its interaction with other literatures. One of the things I would like to work on as a translator is older Ukrainian stuff. There’s a great eighteenth century Ukrainian poet-philosopher, Hryhorii Skovoroda, who wrote poems in Ukrainian, and philosophical works—where he sought a slightly different audience—in a kind of imperial Russian. But they are so in-between linguistically that, in the Soviet period, he was translated into both Russian and Ukrainian. It means you can read him from the viewpoint of either language. In a way, he straddles them.
SH: You’re an incredible poet, and you use a lot of multilingual elements in your writing—like the people you translate. I encourage people to look at Eugene’s work—a lot of them are published in Asymptote (I’m particularly fond of The Feeling Sonnets). How has working with the sentence been different from working with the line? I am interested to hear from you not just as a translator, but a poet.
EO: It was very difficult for me to make the jump into working without lines because I think in lines. To jump from that into this really complicated syntax is incredibly hard. Also, because a line is a line but an English sentence and a Russian sentence are very different… I translate as a poet. What that means is I try to listen to the language—to not just translate word for word but to think, first and foremost, of the effects the author is trying to achieve, the way that the words don’t fit together and the way that they contradict each other: which is something you listen to as a poet, but translators often smooth things out. I try not to, even though I think I ultimately smooth things out. But not as much, hopefully.
AUDIENCE MEMBER (AM): As you put it, the way you are writing to develop the idea, rather than to record it, draws us in, but makes it very difficult in the first read to get the beauty of the book. The lack of clarity as a reader is always challenging; I kept looking for a thread and I couldn’t find one. Is that the overarching approach to the book?
EO: I don’t think that the book lacks clarity; it just doesn’t have a ready-made meaning. I was talking to a friend, the Russian writer Maria Stepanova, about The Trojan Women. It’s a play that Euripides wrote the same year, during the Peloponnesian War, that Athenians attacked a city which was trying to stay out of the war. They stormed the city, killed all the men, and sold all the women and children into slavery; it was a huge war crime. The same year, Euripides puts out this play which has practically no action because it takes place right after the burning of Troy, and the whole play is the lament of the women: first it’s Hecuba, then Cassandra speaks, then all sorts of people speak. [Lucky Breaks] has a very similar way of thinking about the war in the voices of women. It’s also about multiplicity.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator based in New York and Berlin. His forthcoming book of poetry, The Feeling Sonnets, includes work that has previously appeared in Asymptote. In 2019, he judged the poetry category of Asymptote‘s Close Approximations contest. As a translator, he focuses mainly on avant-garde and experimental writings in Russian.
Shawn Hoo is the author of the forthcoming poetry chapbook Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022). His poems can be found in Diode Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, Queer Southeast Asia, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and elsewhere. His translations from the Mandarin Chinese can be found in the Journal of Practice, Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA) and will appear in Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation. Born in Singapore, Shawn is currently based in Shanghai. He is Translation Tuesdays Editor at Asymptote. Find him on Twitter.
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